Pern's Holds and Halls

Holds are the residences of the bulk of the planet Pern's population.

Members of specialized professions on Pern live in Crafthalls and dragonriders live in Weyrs, but for most people, the Hold is both the residence and primary social authority.

Throughout most of Pern, Holds are made up of either stone buildings or networks of caverns both natural and man-made. By shuttering any windows and barring the door, this makes the Holds ideal shelter in times of Threadfall. Holds are under tight strictures to keep Thread-susceptible greenery away from the entrances.

There are three types of Hold. Major Holds are the largest and most politically powerful. These Major Holds are analogous to Greek

The Major Holds are ruled by a Lord Holder, whose power is largely unchecked in his domain so long as he fulfills his responsibility to the Hold's residents; namely, he provides residents protection from Thread, an appropriate education, and food and shelter in return for labor. The Lord provides protection from Thread by tithing a percentage of the Hold's agriculture and other materiel to the Weyr to which his Hold looks.

As the series opens in the novel Dragonflight, there are fifteen such Major Holds, occupying the entire Northern Continent (other than the uninhabitable arctic). These holds are listed below.

Under the jurisdiction of the Major Holds are Minor Holds. These can range widely in size, but operate not unlike a Major Hold on a smaller scale. Despite the name, some of the larger Minor Holds may approach the population of a Major Hold's urban center. Nonetheless, they are subject to the Major Hold of which they are a part and to which they tithe. Minor Holds are managed by a Holder, not a Lord. In many cases, however, a Lord Holder will install his son as Holder at a Minor Hold; the son retains the hereditary title of Lord.

The more rural members of the population live in cotholds. These are much smaller vassal holds, often consisting of a single extended family located near the fields, pasture, or other site of the holders' agricultural pursuits.

The Craft system developed as a way to pass on knowledge within a given skill set. The Harper Hall provides the general education, but on Pern, "higher" education such as the Pernese equivalent to high school or college didn't make sense. The colonists, especially after the advent of Threadfall, needed a way to pass down specialized skills quickly to the new generations. Colonists needed to increase their population quickly, so people were marrying younger and having more children, with many holders marrying by the time they were 16. This also led to a need to push specific skill sets onto those young adults at a younger age in order to have them at a suitable education or "working" level by the time they reached that age.

On Pern, 14 is considered the "Age of Reasoning", the point by which boys and girls are considered adults and able to make their own decisions. As such, most apprenticeships start between the ages of 8-14, though sometimes older apprentices start after they switch Crafts.

Pern has implemented the old Terran practice of "Apprenticing". The system of apprenticeship first developed in the later Middle Ages and came to be supervised by craft guilds and town governments. A master craftsman was entitled to employ young people as an inexpensive form of labour in exchange for providing formal training in the craft. Most apprentices were males, but female apprentices can be found in a number of crafts associated with embroidery, silk-weaving etc. Apprentices were young (usually about fourteen to twenty-one years of age), unmarried and would live in the master craftsman's household. Most apprentices aspired to becoming master craftsmen themselves on completion of their contract (usually a term of seven years), but some would spend time as a journeyman and a significant proportion would never acquire their own workshop.